Telling People What the Hours Are For

Ask somebody filling in a timesheet what happens to it and the most common answer is that it goes to HR, or that it is for payroll, or that they do not know. In a large proportion of cases the hours are also supporting a client invoice, a funding claim, a capitalised asset or a statutory record.

The record described in “Telling People What the Hours Are For” should be created close enough to the work that people are not reconstructing a polished week from memory. When teams assess this workforce software resource for employee monitoring at tech companies, they should keep entry, project selection and correction simple, while explaining which optional activity data is collected and how employees can review it.

Telling them costs a page and changes the quality of what they record, because the care people take is proportionate to what they believe is at stake, and they have usually been given no reason to believe anything is.

For a separate benchmark relevant to “Telling People What the Hours Are For”, consult the SHRM compensation resources. Use it to test record quality, approvals, retention, employee rights and exception handling against the real workflow rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

What the note should say

Where the hours go, by destination, in plain terms. This number appears on your client's invoice. This one is claimed from a funder who audits it. This one determines your pay.

What each destination needs. Narrative for the billable one. Contemporaneity for the funded one. Accurate categories for the paid one.

What approval means in this organisation — the narrow, honest version — so that both the person and their manager have the same understanding of what the signature asserts.

What the data will not be used for. This is the part that builds the trust the rest depends on, and it has to be true.

How to raise a problem: what to do when no code fits, when the hours exceed a cap, when the system will not accept reality.

Why it changes behaviour

Nobody writes a careful narrative for a field they believe nobody reads. The reason narratives are empty is not laziness; it is an accurate assessment of consequence, and the assessment is wrong only because nobody has told them otherwise.

The effect is strongest where the destination is concrete and external. "This goes to the client" produces a different line from "please complete all fields". "This is audited by the funder and disallowance falls on the project" produces a different one again.

The obligation side

Where data protection law applies to employee records, the people concerned are generally entitled to be told what is collected and why, in terms they can understand, before or at the point of collection.

A timesheet system's purpose statement is usually buried in an employee privacy notice issued at induction and never read. That may satisfy the letter and it does not achieve the thing, which is that people know. A short, specific note at the point of use costs nothing and does both.

Where the purpose changes — the hours start feeding something new — that is a new thing to tell people, and it is the moment most organisations skip.

Who should say it

The note from the process owner. The reinforcement from managers, who are the people anybody actually listens to, and who in many cases do not know the answer either.

Briefing approvers on the destinations is a prerequisite for briefing anybody else, and it tends to be the conversation where somebody says they had no idea their signature supported a grant claim.

Keeping it short

One page. Every attempt to make it comprehensive produces a document nobody reads, after which the organisation believes it has communicated.

Five short sections: where the hours go, what each destination needs from you, what approval means here, what we will not do with this, and who to ask. Reviewed annually and whenever a new destination appears.

The test

Ask five people at random what their timesheet is used for. If the answers are vague or wrong, the communication has not happened, regardless of what was published.

Ask again three months after the note goes out. If the answers have not changed, the note was too long.

Saying it more than once

A note issued at induction reaches the people who joined after it was written and nobody else, and induction is the moment at which a person retains least. Most of the workforce will never have seen it.

Repeat it where the work happens: a line on the submission screen naming what this week's hours feed, a reminder when somebody books to a code with an external consumer, a short item when a new project with audit requirements starts. These reach people at the moment the information is useful, which is the only moment it changes anything.